A question which has been posed from time to time at both Arms & Armour Press and Greenhill has been ‘do you publish fiction?’ and the answer has been ‘not knowingly’. But I did publish fiction for a short period in the mid-1980s. When I sold Arms & Armour Press there was written into the Agreement a non-competition clause. This happens when the purchaser of a company does not want the principal selling it on one day and starting a new competing company on the next. So I was constrained from publishing military books in trade editions, and I hasten to add that I was a willing party to this Agreement: the purchaser was paying me quite a lot of money and I understood the need for them to protect their investment. Such non-competition clauses, however, always have to be limited, for you cannot stop somebody working in his profession. I was free to publish anything I liked, except military books in trade editions, for a number of years. Hence I started the Vintage Aviation Library, which restored to print, in the required limited numbers, classics from W orld W ar One. And I started publishing fiction. I thought that reprinting the best early crime and science-fiction books – books by famous authors that were long out of print (and in fact in the public domain) – would find an audience , a market, if only it being libraries. But, to my regret, I was wrong. I selected the crime fiction myself from my studies of early pre-World War One books, and from the standard critical bibliographies and check-lists, and I published a dozen very well-known titles (well, they were well known to historians of crime fiction and bibliographies) such as: The Mystery of Cloomber by Arthur Conan Doyle The Club of Queer Trades by G. K. Chesterton The Big Bow Mystery by Israel Zangwill The Memoirs of Constantine Dix by Barry Pain Hagar of the Pawn-Shop by Fergus Hume The Council of Justice by Edgar Wallace (I reprinted quite a number of Wallace titles in the series) The science fiction was selected for me by Brian Stableford, the well-known critic and writer , and there were some notable volumes, but we only published six titles because it was immediately clear these would not be successful. They were books such as: The Doings of Raffles Haw by Arthur Conan Doyle Tourmaline’s Time Cheques by F . Anstey The Blind Spot by Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint The Inner House by Walter Besant There was a third category of fiction published as Greenhill Famous Authors, and I restored to print ‘stand-alone’ books such as: Sanders of the River by Edgar W a llace Uncollected Forsyte by John Galsworthy The Rover by Joseph Conrad But, as I have said, I seem to have been one of the few people who enjoyed these books, and sales were lacking. The selection of books did however enable me to spend many happy hours in the London Library, I was in touch with all the specialist dealers and built up a small collection, and I read a lot. At the same time I was working on military books and as the list developed, which took several years, the fiction was remaindered and the military books took over. Back to Greenhill Military Book News No. 129 Table of Contents Back to Greenhill Military Book News List of Issues Back to Master Magazine List © Copyright 2004 by Greenhill Books This article appears in MagWeb.com (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com